In their experiments, [1]} familiarised
7-month-old infants with sequences from one of the categories
and then subsequently observed their responses to
sequences containing novel words from both categories.
Overall, the infants showed more interest in stimuli
from the unfamiliar category, indicating they were able
to generalise their experience to words they did not hear
during the familiarisation phase.
[1]} were unable to obtain this form of
generalisation from a neural network trained on the same data,
because the backpropagation learning rule did not
update the weights associated with unseen words during training.
Numerous studies have investigated a variety of aspects of
these experiments,
including how phonetic forms are represented [3]},
the nature of the familiarisation process [4]}
and the knowledge already acquired by the infants before
the experiments [5]}.
